venerdì 3 febbraio 2012

In depth coverage of the concept behind "The Origins of Matter and Life" suite [part 1]

Hi my friend, here is very cold outside, snow is all around and I am in my home while outside the wind blows hard and carries more snow on the countryside.
There's nothing to do but staying at home and then I decided to write this post, an in depth coverage of the concept behind "The Origins of Matter and Life" suite, contained in Lunocode's "Celestial Harmonies" album.

Just out of curiosity, this is the nice landscape outside my door in a particularly calm moment today:

Winter landscape outside my door

As i promised some time ago, then, let's go with the suite!

The Origins of Matter and Life tells the story of the creation of the Universe and tells also the story of a character, Albert II, that is actually the protagonist of the entire tale.
The suite is built up by six different movements that are six songs: "On Matter and Mind", "High", "The Cosmic Architect", "Tree of Life", "Crossing the Line" and "Albert II".

On Matter and Mind is an instrumental overtoure that introduces the listener to the suite by letting him listen to the main themes of every subsequent movement. We chose "On Matter and Mind" as a title because we wanted to refer to those old famous scientific papers.

V2 rocket that carried Albert II into space (wikipedia)

High is the first true song. It opens with our character awaking in a strange place, a place he doesn't recognize. He only feels that it is cold and outside everything is black except for a strange sun, a blue sun. At this point we understand for sure that something very strange is happening: how can a sun be blue and why our character is "talking" to this blue sun? Long story short, our character's name is Albert II and he is a monkey, a Rhesus Monkey, in particular, who was launched by Americans, in 1949 (June 14), into space on board of a V2 rocket (see photo on the right). This is his story, romanticized.

So, being a monkey and being used to consider each luminous globe a "sun", he thinks that what he have in front of him is a sun, because it's luminous and it's round. He then tries to get help from this sun by talking to him and imploring him, as he is used doing so on earth, in his language.

He just doesn't know that he is inside a space capsule and the blue globe, that lies calm and still in front of him, is actually the Earth.
Albert feels confused and afraid, he feels a deep sense of panic while everything becomes weightless and he understands that he can't control anymore his movements like he was used to. Even if he doesn't know, he is experiencing weightlessness in space: the reason for him being thrown into space inside the capsule.
He feels a sense of panic and fear and then, maybe for the effects of weightlessness or maybe for some other reason, he sees the "blue sun" transforming into a pulsating light that's getting closer to him.
Now he is really terrified and, plus, he starts to see strange images and hear a rhythmic sound coming out of his chest while he sees his eyes breaking into shards and floating all around him.
After this, he sees the blue globe turning into an eye staring at him and he finally feels himself flowing through this eye. His journey has started.

Notes: at the end of the song you can hear the phrase "by the rule of one-hundred and thirty seven" and you might wonder what's the meaning of this 137-thing. Well, this is a reference to Wolfgang Pauli's obsession for that number (it seems to show up in many physic equations).
Another curiosity is the sentence "and becomes an eye scanning darkly through the eons". This is another "tribute" to one of my favourite sci-fi authors, Philip K. Dick. I like very much his novel "A Scanner Darkly".